Howlin in Anguish, Travelin By Beard
This isn’t a eulogy for Anthony Bourdain. It’s a celebration of rock and roll. Which in its way is a celebration of that which Bourdain loved. Rather than focus on the man who’s gone, let’s hoist a fucking chalice to the man who’s still here, Ethan Miller.
Miller might not have inspired a love of travel, untold stories, or unconsidered cuisines among the masses like Bourdain, but for those of us whose brain wheat he’s savagely scythed, the trips we’ve taken wrapped in the wild hairs of his Bay-wind-born beard have been every bit as woolly, and wonder-stoking.
This Friday, June 15, Miller and Howlin Rain, his long-running traveling tent at the countless crossroads of cosmic-American soul and fiery fuzz, baptize Mississippi Studios in molten guitar, sandpaper street tales, and the kind of bass runs that liquidate organs like Ebola.
The Adventures of Baron Oblivion
Last time I touched the void under Miller’s auspices was watching his psychedelic folk “supergroup” Heron Oblivion, featuring members of the first band of his I fell in love with, Comets on Fire, as well as Espers and the chronically under-sung Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound. Meg Baird’s spooky vocal beauty danced demonically with Noel Von Harmonson and Charlie Saufley’s feedback-spangled dueling leads to tangle the frayed edges between the ethereal and thunderous.
There were moments I closed my eyes and opened them in a field in England, surrounded by Trees, John Martyn, and the Albion Country Band. Sounds from further afield reverberated, too, like the astro-pastoral flights of Emtidi and Carol of Harvest, the muddy meditations of Brightblack Morning Light, or the baroque primitivism of Six Organs of Admittance, led by his former cohort Ben Chasny.
Night of the Comets
Together, Chasny and Miller had managed to pull off the impossible and somehow one-up one of my favorite contemporary bands, Kinski. It was probably 2004, but who can say for sure? The latter had done to the Doug Fir what only Acid Mothers Temple had done before. Still flying high on “Airs Above Your Station” and the goddamn anthem that is “Semaphore,” Kinski had crunched that shit like a psilocybin-filled Kinder Egg still in its thin plastic shell. Heading into the second night of an ear-damaging double-feature, I was not expecting escalation.
That was a mistake.
What I got was levitation. Not the Hawkwind album, although I couldn’t help but be reminded of those space-rangers’ earlier work on sonic assaults like “Doremi Fasol Latido” as Von Harmonson slipped the Dik Mik to an orgasmic echoplex. More like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators with electric jug fed through Eno’s tape devices circa Roxy’s “For Your Pleasure” and cranked to Melvins-esque volume levels.
No band I’ve seen since has quite matched the strobing madness of that show. Miller set new personal (mine, not his as far as I know) standards for chaotic great, not good, rock godliness. Chasny brought the mystical while Miller mined the deep places even dwarfs dare not venture. That contrast between the heavenly and the hellish has proven to be a template for Miller’s lasting appeal in the years since.
The Howlin
Howlin Rain’s self-titled first album blew in via Birdman Records in 2006, and it was another revelation. Not nearly as noisy as Comets, it introduced me to another facet of Miller’s persona, songwriter. Not that Comets didn’t have songs, but they always seemed subservient to the breaking squall of screams and swirling six-strings. That was the point. But with Howlin Rain, stories and imagery took center stage, or at least begrudgingly shared it with the cinematic maelstrom.
A song like “Indians, Whores and Spanish Men of God” couldn’t have been created by anybody else. An unholy orgy of revelers painted with Herzog, Peckinpah, and Jodorowsky resin, this wasn’t indie-rock. Some critics have used the term “classic rock” as a short-hand, but it was at times more abrasive than that ill-defined conglomeration often got. And it could be funky as fucking while camping! The stank on that “Indians” bassline and drum-break was certainly the stuff of ’70s arrangements, but there was neither navel-gazing nor nostalgia for its own sake at work there.
Bride of The Alligator
Howlin Rain has birthed four studio albums since then, with the latest, “The Alligator Bride,” hitting this past Friday courtesy of Silver Current Records. Miller also released a steady onslaught of albums, EPs, and 7-inches with his punkier power trio Feral Ohms over the past five years, but I’ll leave you to discover their slopping swagger on your own.
I fucking hate hot takes, and for me, that’s what a review of “The Alligator Bride” would be at this early date. Closing track “Coming Down” is already earning a place in my waking dreamscape, with its cascading, middle-eastern guitar-solo coda taking me to destinations not far removed from Zep’s “Kashmir.” The title track has elsewhere been accurately compared to Neil and Crazy Horse’s “Zuma” period, and I’d specify the inglorious, creeping death of “Cortez the Killer.”
Unlike the Aztecs, Ethan Miller’s empire shows no signs of destruction from within or without, but if one thing was reiterated to me this week, it’s that there aren’t always signs. More importantly, we shouldn’t wait for signs of distress before we sing the praises of the prophets, mad men, and rock revolutionaries among us. May Ethan Miller kill it for another 30 years, at least, but go see him this weekend and get that old-time religious release.
